Bonus Post: Author Leslie Jamison's MFA Workshop Syllabus

I’m always eager to see how expert craftspeople do what they do, and if they teach it to others, there’s nothing quite like getting your hands on their syllabus.

Especially when it’s Leslie Jamison’s.

Leslie Jamison teaches a thesis workshop and seminar in Columbia University’s MFA program called “Archive Fever.” In it she guides writers to think about different ways to respond to archival material, and how to incorporate it into their work.

Jamison is a highly prolific writer interested in hybridization. Her work relies on archival research which she seamlessly integrates into her work. Her books include: Splinters, The Recovering, The Empathy Exams, Make it Scream, Make it Burn, The Gin Closet and Peggy (which is a book by the late Rebecca Godfrey, which Jamison finished after Rebecca’s death.)

We are constantly archiving our lives, even if we don’t realize it. Our digital photo albums take up all our storage, our notes apps are collapsing under their own weight, and we’re in the process of reading sixteen different things at all times.

Today, as a bonus, I offer Leslie Jamison’s Syllabus for her workshop.

ARCHIVE FEVER SEMINAR

Archives are records of minds and bodies and secrets.

They are full of surprises: the cigarette burns marking John Berryman’s 12-step inventories; the jam-sticky fingerprints of Marilynne Robinson’s toddler son in her composition books, where novel fragments live alongside grocery lists; the instructions to Jean Rhys’s caregivers to put more ice cubes in her evening tumblers of whiskey, the postcards sent from 19th-century sanitarium patients to beloveds living elsewhere.

In this course, we will be exploring the allure of the archives—their enchantments, their tyrannies, their obfuscations, their practicalities, their labyrinthine passageways—and thinking about how creative work can incorporate archival research in surprising and dynamic ways. Archives are necessarily incomplete, and their gaps are just as resonant as their records.

Our readings will range across genres--creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry—and will include Saidiya Hartman, Arlette Farge, Mark Nowak, Kiki Petrosino, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Maggie Nelson. - Leslie Jamison

BELOW, PLEASE FIND THE SYLLABUS…

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.